From First Principles Thinking to Moaning and Back
On Exodus
And [God] said to Abram, “Know well that your offspring shall be strangers in a land not theirs, and they shall be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years; furthermore (v’gam) I will execute judgment on the nation they shall serve, and in the end they shall go free with great wealth. (Genesis 15:13-14)
I also (v’gam) established My covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they lived as sojourners. Furthermore (v’gam)I have heard the moaning of the Israelites because the Egyptians are holding them in bondage, and I have remembered My covenant. (Exodus 6:4-5)
God seals the fate of the Israelites in Genesis in his covenant to Abraham. God promises Abraham that his descendants will be enslaved and exiled, that their oppressors will be brought low, and that the net result of the generational trial will be positive. On a simple level, the Israelites will leave Egypt with prosperity, but on a deeper level, they will leave with greater character, greater faith, greater empathy, greater resilience—all necessary ingredients for the preservation and longevity of the covenant. From this zoom-out, macro view, the enslavement of the Israelites which we read about in Exodus is pre-determined. And while the Kings of Egypt bear moral responsibility for their cruelty, they are mere mechanisms for the deliverance of God’s will. A small word “v’gam” (“and furthermore”) serves as the hinge to God’s twofold promise: a promise of denigration and a promise of redemption. The redemption is path-dependent on the denigration. There is no short-cut to redemption.
The same word “v’gam” (and furthermore) appears in this week’s parasha, Va’era. First, God repeats to Moses what God had already told Abraham. Then God adds a new point prefaced with another v’gam: “I have heard the moaning…” What does this second point add to the first? On Passover, we sing the song “Dayennu” (“It would have been enough”). It would have been enough had God simply promised Abraham that the people would be enslaved and then freed. It would have been enough had God simply reiterated this promise to Moses. But the text adds a new reason for God speaking to Moses now and intervening: the people’s moaning. Let’s say it even more strongly: God would save the people from slavery even if he hadn’t made a promise to Abraham, on account of their moaning. God would save the people from slavery even if God had no intent to bring the Egyptians low and raise the Israelites up, simply on account of their moaning.
Here we come to the Torah’s split-screen moment. On one side, we see the third-person view of things, on the other side we see the first-person account. On one side, God follows “first principles thinking.” On the other, God responds in time and space to least principled and most visceral expression: bodies in pain. How to think about the relationship between the two? This very subject has troubled philosophy from the onset as it has oscillated between the aspiration for an objective view of things and a subjective or experiential view of things. When studying the human condition should we take a cosmological view or an anthropological one? Is the most interesting thing we can say about ourselves that we are made of atoms or that we are beings for whom our being is an issue? Are we just brains or is there something more to consciousness than just “compute power”? An objectivist view treats us compositionally, mechanically, and algorithmically, a subjectivist one hears (and feels) our moan, literal and metaphorical. God holds both views. But leans on the subjectivist one in Exodus to teach us something.
In “Duties of the Heart,” Bahya ibn Paquda argues that we are obligated not just to carry out physical mitzvot, which he calls duties of the limbs, but we have a spiritual obligation which is foundational and present at all times to serve God with love. In a powerful metaphor, he compares the mitzvot of everyday life to the tasks of the field and the mitzvot of the heart to the tasks of the home. When working the field, we get time off, and can excuse ourselves when conditions don’t apply. When working in the home, we are always “on,” as there is always work to be done. When making the archetypal human being, God first created its heart, its soul. Only secondarily did God creates its body. Thus, the duties of the heart are ontologically primary, the duties of the limbs secondary. An armless man is exempted from wrapping tefillin, but not from serving God with his heart. In Auschwitz, as in Egypt, it was impossible to carry out many duties of the limbs, but it was not impossible to carry out duties of the heart.
Ibn Paquda begins his work by asking a version of this question, “If duties of the heart are so foundational and so important that they apply at all times how is it that nobody before me ever wrote about them systematically? What explains the error of omission?” Here I offer my own answer to this question. That which is ontologically primary is not experientially primary. What is first from God’s point of view is second from ours and vice versa. Or as Hölderlin puts it “Near and difficult to grasp is God.” Heidegger exposits: It is the very nearness of God that makes God difficult to grasp. It is the nearness of the duties of the heart that makes them so elusive. And it is the nearness of the objective view that makes us blind to it. Initially and for the most part the moan is what is near to us, not the theological view which says it is all for the good.
God tells Moses that two apparently conflicting things are true at the same time: the bondage in Egypt is ultimately a blessing and a driver of tremendous long-term value AND God hears the moans of the people. God can hold both perspectives, the perspective of disinterested truth and human-centric pathos. God first makes the duties of the heart, but God also grants us duties of the limbs so that we might come to a higher understand through that which is tangible and practical. Mitoch she lo lishma ba lishma; we come to appreciate that which is intrinsically valuable by means of that which is only instrumentally valuable. Similarly, the people begin with the moan and eventually work through it to find the covenantal view on the other side.
Crucially, we are not asked to skip over the moan and achieve a divine point of view. We are not only allowed to moan but told that our moans stir God’s heart. Rachmana liba baey: God wants to receive our authentic, heartfelt moan. Only by descending into our place of suffering can it open up something beyond it. Still, as Freud says, there is a distinction between mourning and melancholy, between suffering that heals and suffering that keeps us stuck. The moan is a cry for change, a form of mourning, and in its own way a moving on. Slavery in Egypt until the moment of the moan was melancholy, the anguish of suppressed of anguish.
Just as we are changed by our moan, so God is changed by it, too. God enters into history in the Exodus story. The moan of the people is the collectivized, scaled up groan of Abraham after his adult circumcision. Thus it merits its own “v’gam.” There is a chiddush, an innovation in this moan, namely, that we can offer a chiddush to God. God is the God of History, not just the God of changeless eternity. God is the God who hears moans, not just the God of first principles. There are times when we can be comforted knowing that all will be well, and there are times when we can be comforted knowing that, irrespective of outcome, we are heard. The God who appears to Moses demonstrates the importance not just of a God who is in control but of a God who accompanies. Thus, in Exodus God emerges not just as a creator and redeemer, but as a figure of “pastoral care.” Of course, when we hear people in pain and can do something to alleviate it, we should. But sometimes the most powerful thing we can offer is an acknowledgment of the moan itself.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins
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